5 Ways Big Data is Changing Legal Practice

Innovation buzz words like “analytics” “AI” and “big data” have been getting a lot of coverage recently, but how are they affecting the bottom line for law firms?

Below are 5 ways that big data can build law firm value:

Business Development

Everyone wants to know what the competition is up to, and with the right analytics, you can find out. By using natural language processing to collect from media sites, judgements and regulatory documents you can get great insights into the competition and prospective clients, who has expertise, who has work on and each law firm’s client lists.

With analytics you can find the clients that best align with your unique expertise and effectively demonstrate this to win their business.

Due Diligence

Significantly reduce the cost and time required to perform due diligence. One of the most time consuming tasks is collecting information from government registers, scrolling through different local, state and federal government websites to find a company’s interactions.

With data analytics, your firm can search for regulatory licenses, property information and litigation history without having to drawl through dozens of different government registries.

Not only is this method more efficient, it can also allow lawyers to provide a more in-depth analysis of a company’s records, comparing them with their closest competitors to find trends and patterns about a company’s regulatory behaviour.

Using big-data not only produces a due diligence report at a substantially lower cost, it also allows law firms to provide clients with more in depth information.

Litigation Strategy

Litigation analytics is changing the way lawyers run their cases and advise their clients. Analytics provide lawyers allow lawyers to size up their opposing counsel, looking at their previous litigation history, experience with judges and areas of law and settlement rates.

Analytics also provides the ability to analyse judge and party decision-making patterns, looking for vexatious litigants and favourable legal jurisdictions. These metrics minimise frivolous litigation and provide the insight needed to win crucial lawsuits.

Regulatory Advisory

Corporations are consistently dealing with regulatory bodies across local, state and federal levels of government. Using Analytics, Governance, Risk and Compliance teams can analyse key trends in regulatory decision making and how these decisions may affect the operations of their clients.

This allows lawyers to brief their clients on risks they may face before they affect their bottom line.

Property Development

Data analytics technology offers planning and development teams the ability to assess the legal and regulatory risks associated with property developments in particular local regions. Lawyers and commercial advisers can assess the development and planning approval activity to find out which firms are getting approvals and why some are getting rejected. This will provide lawyers with the information they need to advise property developers about the risks and opportunities of new developments, minimising their risk and maximising their return.

These techniques and more are showing the legal community that big data is here to stay and that all this talk of innovation is converting into direct law firm value.

Conrad Karageorge is managing director of legal analytics start-up Jurimetrics. The company has just launched a beta version of their data analytics platform which can be accessed here: https://demo.jurimetrics.com.au/